Research and analysis of raw data is important in a wide variety of fields, and typically involves traversing isolated information sources including paper reports and internal databases such as the Microsoft Excel™ spreadsheet to extract and analyze data in business, government, and academic settings. By way of example, each chart or slide in a PowerPoint™ presentation is prepared individually by extracting data by hand from an Excel™ spreadsheet format and by entering the data manually into the presentation program.
Even in the computer age, the task of generating data charts and the like from data sources is often tedious and requires a significant amount of time. One might conclude that today's information worker is much like the previous generation's factory worker assembling parts alongside a conveyer belt. The task is no longer to refine an endless stream of raw materials into physical goods, but rather to refine an ever-increasing amount of raw data into an understandable form.
An example of such ‘industrialized’ information work is the custom or ‘ad hoc’ market research (“MR”) industry. The MR industry serves virtually all of the nation's major companies from consumer packaged goods to industrial products to services of every type. Market research vendors provide technical research design, implementation, and analytical services for their clients.
Market researchers typically tabulate raw data, such as data regarding consumer responses to various questions about a particular product and/or service, into books of data tables that researchers can refer to when they conduct their analysis. The information in the data tables is then presented in a user-friendly format, such as in charts and/or graphs created using an application like PowerPoint™, so that the results can be easily understood by clients. Putting the data into this user-friendly format is usually the job of the market researcher. For instance, the charting task often entails physically paging through a book or electronic version of data tables that can be thousands of pages long, selecting the needed data, and then manually typing or pasting the data into dozens if not hundreds of individual PowerPoint™ charts. It is not uncommon for this part of a market research job to take a researcher about 50 man-hours to complete.
What is needed is a system and method for expediting the process of finding and extracting specified data from data tables and for changing that data into an understandable, comprehensive form.